Film Review: Rangoon is all over the place; Saif's performance is brilliant

Rangoon works neither as a romance between three strong-willed individuals nor as a patriotic drama

Vishal Bhardwaj’s cinema has been blessed with offbeat subjects, superb music, memorable characters, realistic performances, and subversive streaks. But his films have also been bedevilled by incomplete plots, scripting contrivances, an over-reliance on glamour and the inability to wrench himself from the formula he claims to be reinventing. Every Vishal Bhardwaj film is a work in progress towards the masterpiece that his followers believe he will create some day. Rangoon is a fabulously filmed period drama about the intersection of cinema and nationalism, but it remains at the crossroads where other Bhardwaj’s titles can be found. The 167-minute movie is